Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM)

News Archive

Nigel Brauser and Tamara Pico co-winners of the Outstanding Leadership in Materials Award

Posted Jun 03, 2014

On June 2, 2014, during the MSE Class Day, Nigel Brauser from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, and Tamara Pico from the Chemistry department, were awarded the Outstanding Leadership in Materials Award.

This award was created in 2009 to recognize a student or students who were particularly involved in the program at all levels including academics, research and leadership. This award is not necessarily given every year. But this year, we are pleased to have Nigel and Tamara share this award.

Nigel and Tamara are absolutely central to the MSE program. They served as co-presidents of the Princeton Materials Research Society for the past couple of years and during this time, they revitalized the program and have helped spearheaded a number of successful activities, including field trips, study breaks, hosting open houses and even hosting a few seminars from industrial researchers. In addition to the social activities, both Tamara and Nigel performed outstanding independent work. Tamara worked with Prof. Howard Stone where she focused on microfluidic fabrication of multicompartment hydrogel fibers. Nigel worked with Prof. Mike Littman on 'the acoustic tuning of intake and exhaust systems in a 4-stroke motorcycle engine."

After graduation, they both will be putting their materials science skills to work with Nigel becoming the manager of the mineral collections at Princeton and Tamara pursuing a PhD in Applied Physics at Harvard. Given their many contributions to the Materials Science and Engineering community on campus, we are honored to give them this award.